As a busy entrepreneur who typically has five to 10 meetings a day, it seems natural that the next big thing out of Paul English’s venture studio would be a scheduling app.
On Tuesday, Boston Venture Studio launched the app, dubbed Supercal, and provided a comparison chart showcasing Supercal’s free offerings versus a $12-a-month subscription to Calendly, a leader in online scheduling. English said his crew is marketing Supercal to Calendly users, reaching out to let them know what they can get for free.
“I’ve been using it obsessively,” English said of Supercal. “I have an assistant [but] she’s more of a director of operations. … I don’t want to waste her time scheduling meetings.”
Supercal’s main focus is on scanning the personal calendars of small groups of people to suggest good meeting times. English recognizes not everyone is comfortable with letting artificial intelligence pick meeting times, but he believes skeptics will be won over after they give it a try. English is using software from OpenAI for the app.
“Once people let go and let AI pick the best time, it really will do a better job than a human assistant,” English said.
Supercal’s team is much smaller than the Calendly workforce. English said he has 10 people working on the project; Boston Venture Studio consists of seven people in the Boston and New York areas, and around 25 programmers in Pakistan.
He said he started working on Supercal in January after coming to the conclusion that “group scheduling is badly broken.”
Rather than charge for basic scheduling services, English said he hopes to make money by using AI to analyze users’ meeting transcripts and coach them on how to run better meetings.
It’s the up-to-date app to emerge out of English’s virtual studio. Perhaps best known for co-founding and eventually selling online travel firm Kayak, English established Boston Venture Studio as a launchpad for consumer apps in 2022, and he sold podcast discovery app Moonbeam later that year. Another popular app is Steppin, which encourages users to lock their social media accounts until they make a certain amount of steps in a given day.
“The biggest one is Supercal, that’s where most of our resources are being spent,” English said. “[Rivals] were built a long time ago. We are built with AI, using more modern technologies. We can accelerate past them with a much smaller team.”
This is an installment of our weekly Bold Types column about the movers and shakers on Boston’s business scene.
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him @jonchesto.
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